Reimagining Pilgrimage

Raymond Mentzer

doi:10.4324/b23008-3

From the outset, Protestant church leaders rejected pilgrimage as an appropriate form of religious piety. Yet key features of pilgrimage persisted among the faithful. Tension between official condemnation and popular endurance was sizeable and longstanding. Indeed, the anxieties surrounding the subject remain alive in the twenty-first century. Scholars continue to explore the understandings of pilgrimage among Protestants. Recent research efforts are substantial. They fall into three major categories. To begin, specialists have examined the continuation of various late medieval practices. Others have investigated the revival of pilgrimage to Palestine among American Evangelical Protestants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, historians have analyzed the ambiguous meaning of pilgrimage for followers of the contemporary French Reformed tradition. In all of this, it is evident that some Protestants adopted a classical understanding of pilgrimage as a long and arduous journey to some sacred place as an act of religious faith and devotion. In other instances, they have recognized the journey as a quest for a moral or commemorative purpose, as to pay homage to a special person or event. All have modified and adapted the notion of pilgrimage in accordance with particular theological elaborations and the promotion of confessional and communal solidarity.

Reimagining Pilgrimage

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